SAN FRANCISCO — In an explosive public market debut that may pave the way for future tech offerings, shares in cloud communications startup Twilio skyrocketed to nearly twice their IPO price Thursday.

San Francisco-based Twilio saw a first-day pop of nearly 92 percent in its closely-watched opening day of trading, even after pricing its stock above the anticipated range. It was the biggest day-one bump a tech company has seen in more than two years, according to Renaissance Capital, which manages IPO-focused exchange-traded funds.

That’s good news for the Silicon Valley tech community, which has been in an IPO drought since Square went public in November.

“I think it’s a shot in the arm for Silicon Valley tech companies,” said Kathleen Smith, a principal at Renaissance Capital “It will lay the path for others to follow.”

Twilio took a risk stepping into the public market when it did — it priced its IPO on the eve of Britain’s vote on whether to remain in the European Union, a move that could have reverberated through the global economy. But experts say Twilio’s pricing, as well as pent-up market demand for tech stock, combined to give the company a first-day performance that surprised even optimistic industry watchers.

In a show of confidence, the company Wednesday priced its shares at $15, above the expected $12-$14 range. The following day Twilio opened at $23.99 — 60 percent above its IPO price — and soared to $29.61 Thursday afternoon before closing at $28.79.

“You can certainly feel the excitement from people,” said Chris Taylor, executive vice president of global research, thought leadership and partnerships for analytics company Ipreo. “I think people were hoping for this to be a success. Almost a doubling in the open market — I don’t think many people were imagining that type of activity.”

The first-day surge turned Twilio from a private “unicorn” company valued at just over $1 billion into a public company with a market cap of $2.4 billion when the market closed Thursday. The company, which raised $150 million in its IPO, trades on the NYSE under the ticker symbol TWLO.

Experts say the soaring debut may help ease other companies’ anxieties about going public. Some venture-backed companies with huge private valuations had avoided pricing IPOs out of fear their company’s worth would take a hit on the public market, they said. Those fears, plus global economic uncertainty, helped all but dry up the market for tech IPOs.

Aside from Twilio, only two U.S.-based tech companies have gone public this year. SecureWorks, a Georgia-based cybersecurity company owned by Dell, priced a lackluster $112 million IPO in April, discounting its shares below its planned price range. Maryland-based Acacia Communications went public last month, and its shares spiked 35 percent during its first day of trading.

“I think there’s been such a backlog in the IPO market, and I think everybody has been waiting for somebody to go out there and open it,” said Venky Ganesan, managing director of Menlo Ventures and chair of the National Venture Capital Association board of directors, “and I think that’s what Twilio has done. Now there’s no excuse. If you’re a good company, you should be able to go out.”

Twilio, which has yet to make a profit and posted $167 million in revenue last year, sells tools that other companies use to build voice and messaging services into their platforms. Uber’s ride-hailing platform, for example, uses Twilio technology to allow drivers and passengers to communicate.

The Twilio team had some fun showcasing its technology at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday in honor of its public debut. Co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson, whose 8.6 million shares are now worth almost $250 million, rang the bell and then kicked off a “code jam,” during which three developers began coding from the trading floor. The developers used the Twilio interface to build a host of new apps, some silly — like one that lets users call Hodor, a character from HBO’s “Game of Thrones” — and some serious — a directory to text congressional representatives.

“The code you write makes phones ring. But it does far more than that. It unites a community of developers, reduces the distance between a citizen and their congressperson, and sparks Hodor-sized belly laughs,” Twilio marketing manager Kyle Kelly-Yahner wrote in a company blog post Thursday. “Today, that code brought us — the whole community — to the NYSE where, for the first time, we made a bell ring. We can’t thank you enough for being an integral part of that and we can’t wait to see what you build.”

Marisa Kendall covers housing for the Bay Area News Group, focusing on the impact local companies have on housing availability in the region. She's also written about technology startups and venture capital for BANG, and covered courts for The Recorder in San Francisco. She started her career as a crime reporter for The News-Press in Southwest Florida.

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